発見, hakken: a finding. This is a record of what one designer notices in a week.

I grew up beside the Arakawa, in Adachi, and spent five years in a Ginza studio drawing identities for companies you have used without once thinking about them. That work teaches you to read a city as a page. A vending machine is set type. A rice bag is a packaging problem somebody solved in the eighties and nobody has improved on since. A good deal of the best design in Japan is like that: already in the street, unsigned, waiting to be looked at properly.

So this magazine watches the street as well as the feed. Around fifty sources come in through the day, ten of them Japanese, and what the world's studios are arguing about is counted and plotted so you can watch it move. Every third day I write about one thing I actually stood in front of.

What you get for a story is a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the way out to the people who reported it. Never the article itself, and never the photograph as though it were ours. A story written in Japanese stays in Japanese here, headline and excerpt both, because that is how its author set it down.

Everything is also published in Japanese at hakkenmag.com/ja/.

— Ren Arakawa, Tokyo

← Hakken Archive

World Landscape Architecture

Thirty years of designing for biodiversity

October 14

Thirty years of designing for biodiversity - Featured - landscape architecture - #landscapearchitecture

Biodiversity Design Featured Landscape Architecture

Read at World Landscape Architecture ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Thirty years of designing for biodiversity

More from World Landscape Architecture on Hakken

Profile | Niels de Bruin World Landscape Architecture

Arcadia opens Sunshine Coast studio led by Jamie Franklin World Landscape Architecture

Harmony with Nature House | Landscape Tectonix World Landscape Architecture

Biodiverse Planting Design: Thinking Beyond Species Lists World Landscape Architecture

Call for 2027 WLA Awards Jury Applications World Landscape Architecture

Phase 1 of The Point gets underway World Landscape Architecture